Problems with the forum???

[Anil]

[Guest LilBambi]

You may have noticed a message yesterday that our forums were moving.Our hosting company has moved us to their new data center where there should be better bandwidth and redundancy.The move seems to have gone very well.

[striker]

Forums were/are extremely slow if reachable at all. All other sites I frequent don't have problems at all, just these forums. Does Scot have a new blog entry out there or something like that?

[cybormoron]

problems here also, won't connect, connection resetting.

[striker]

Was trying to check Scots blog to see if that could be the culpit of the slow forums. Guess what ???? It shows up completely blank, empty, nada, zilch, nothing at all...Other sites work OK. (using FF 3.0.5b / Fedora 9)

[Ed_P]

The move seems to have gone very well.

Apparently the move is having growing pains.

[striker]

Just checked Scots blog...

403 Error - ForbiddenYou have recieved this message because the resource you have requested is not accessable by the webserver due to file permissions or other locking conditions. Please verify that you have access rights to the requested resource or that the Apache daemon has access rights to the requested resource before trying again.

BTW: I pasted and copied the above ...something is wrong there...to my knowledge it should be 'received' instead of 'recieved' , wonder if Scot knows about what is going on there.

[cybormoron]

i get this. http://img171.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...error001tg2.jpgi found this about searchportal information. which explains why it's in the mvps hosts file.

searchportal.information.com is a typo-squatting, ad serving crap outfit.

Edited June 16, 2008 by cybormoron

[striker]

I'm in the testing phase with Fedora 9, don't using a host file (yet, but will come! )

[striker]

Forums are back to normal again, Scots blog works again too.

[zlim]

Posting times are off by about 50 minutes.http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?showtopic=21104I noticed this yesterday and checked my profile to see if I had DST on.

[Guest LilBambi]

Actually the server itself was off by 173 minutes.I have compensated for it in the Admin panel. Sorry I was in the middle of doing that when something else came up here and I had to take care of it.Should be fixed now.I am showing 11:34AM EDT when I post this.EDIT And sure enough 11:34AM matched the post time of this post. Hope that is true for everyone.

[striker]

What happened last night... again that 403 Error - Forbidden message with the word with wrong spelling in it. I smell troubles here.

[Tushman]

What happened last night... again that 403 Error - Forbidden message with the word with wrong spelling in it. I smell troubles here.

hehe... oh yeah I smell a fubar. I was actually at a community center yesterday and using their computer lab and when I first saw the message, I thought it was their web filtering software. But when I came home and got the same message, I was thinking the website had been hacked. Me startin' to think that Scot angered some PC users for going Mac and this is their revenge! haha.

[lewmur]

hehe... oh yeah I smell a fubar. I was actually at a community center yesterday and using their computer lab and when I first saw the message, I thought it was their web filtering software. But when I came home and got the same message, I was thinking the website had been hacked. Me startin' to think that Scot angered some PC users for going Mac and this is their revenge! haha.

Nah! People who spend all that money on a MAC are deserving of sympathy, not revenge. Actually, this has been a on going problem since Scot switched ISPs. He knows how to get the board back up but I don't think they have yet to figure out what is causing it to crash.

[alphaomega]

What happened last night... again that 403 Error - Forbidden message with the word with wrong spelling in it. I smell troubles here.

Last night, I was getting the message as mentioned in post 98 of this threadand right below that on the same page, I was seeing what looked like a random search portal page(iframe) from searchportal(dot)information(dot)com.I see a similar search page when I click on the misspelled link on scotfinnie(dot)comThe link for "Scot's Newsletter" towards the end of the paragraph.HTH

[Grasshopper]

I just (8:43 pm Central, Thursday evening) got a 503 error when trying to read unread posts to this thread. I clicked back, clicked on the unread posts link again and it worked fine. FYI.

[Ed_P]

Last night, I was getting the message as mentioned in post 98 of this threadand right below that on the same page, I was seeing what looked like a random search portal page(iframe) from searchportal(dot)information(dot)com.

Yup, me too. Edited June 27, 2008 by EdP

[porthugh]

Last night, I was getting the message as mentioned in post 98 of this threadand right below that on the same page, I was seeing what looked like a random search portal page(iframe) from searchportal(dot)information(dot)com.

And here as well.

[alphaomega]

I just (8:43 pm Central, Thursday evening) got a 503 error when trying to read unread posts to this thread. I clicked back, clicked on the unread posts link again and it worked fine. FYI.

Something like this just happened to me as well.Was reading a thread in the water cooler...and on the last page...I clicked on the "water cooler" link (bottom right) to returnand I got the error message along with some search page.Went back in the browser history and clicked on the link again...and it came up fine.

[striker]

Something like this just happened to me as well.Was reading a thread in the water cooler...and on the last page...I clicked on the "water cooler" link (bottom right) to returnand I got the error message along with some search page.Went back in the browser history and clicked on the link again...and it came up fine.

Likewise here when replying to a question in the ATL section. It feels as if the forums are back up but not stable... and sometimes the Clickable Smilies at the left side are just shown partly, better say messed up. (using the fox 3.0 here, not the beta.) I think Scot resurrected the forums from a back up yesterday, albeit he may be short on time to have a look into it for the dot on the i. After all he has a job to do. So I would say give it a few days and hope it won't go down under again.

[Scot]

All --There have been some problems lately and we are investigating. It appears that the server that this site runs on was compromised -- although not the data behind the forums itself. We have taken steps. I believe that stability has returned, but you be the judge of that. We're still looking at a lot of things and considering what if any further actions we may take.One thing though: That search page that comes up is our webhost's (yes, spelling error and all). That page comes up automatically when the server is down for any reason. And we have been down a few times over the last couple of weeks. I agree that it's a bad looking page. IX used to have a better page, I don't know what possessed them to use these newer pages. Plus they have several of them in different colors, and they really do look like a phony site that a hacker would throw up -- but they really are IX's error-covering pages. Go figure.-- ScotP.S. I haven't restructured the forums from a backup or anything like that. But I am seriously monitoring the safety and well being of the website's server area. Please keep posting about your experiences, if you notice anything unusual.

[mac]

All --There have been some problems lately and we are investigating. It appears that the server that this site runs on was compromised -- although not the data behind the forums itself. We have taken steps. I believe that stability has returned, but you be the judge of that. We're still looking at a lot of things and considering what if any further actions we may take.One thing though: That search page that comes up is our webhost's (yes, spelling error and all). That page comes up automatically when the server is down for any reason. And we have been down a few times over the last couple of weeks. I agree that it's a bad looking page. IX used to have a better page, I don't know what possessed them to use these newer pages. Plus they have several of them in different colors, and they really do look like a phony site that a hacker would throw up -- but they really are IX's error-covering pages. Go figure.-- ScotP.S. I haven't restructured the forums from a backup or anything like that. But I am seriously monitoring the safety and well being of the website's server area. Please keep posting about your experiences, if you notice anything unusual.

Scot,I've gotten a "503" error several times this morning, twice while trying to reply to a post, and once while clicking on a different forum board. Using IE7 on XP SP3. Edited June 27, 2008 by mac

[Scot]

OK, I think I may know why that is. I'm going to try something and if you would, please let me know if the problems go away.

[Ed_P]

and I got the error message along with some search page.Went back in the browser history and clicked on the link again...and it came up fine.

The history probably pulled the page from the brower's cache on your hd while the link was trying to access the website. imo

[alphaomega]

Scot,Thanks for the explanation.I could understand the error message I was seeing...I was just a little concerned about the random search page I was seeing(similar to the one you see at scotsnewsleter(dot)com (one t) andthe misspelled link on scotfinnie(dot)com)Cheers

[Guest LilBambi]

Hmmm, you are right, there is a typo in the link to Scot's Blog for his newsletter in the information/ links on ScotFinnie.com, and someone obviously and intentionally bought scotsnewsleter.com (notice the single t as alphaomega mentioned in the link for "Scot's Newsletter" ) to accommodate the error! And they apparently even took the time to setup a subdomain for blog.scotsnewsleter.com or maybe they were just taking advantage of the error by directing everything to that page for the domain if it doesn't exist ... certainly very interesting.As far as the error pages that folks have seen on scotsnewsletter.com (forums. and blog.), for missing pages, forbidden/permissions issues errors, etc. over the last week ... these are the same IX Webhosting generated error pages that they use with all their client's websites if you click on a link that doesn't exist or has the wrong permissions, etc. ... but they are apparently trying to make some money on clicks on these error pages. I personally, do not agree with their policy on this, but many, unfortunately, are replacing standard approved browser type error pages with their own error pages, including ISPs like Verizon etc. The ads to me are the offensive part since you have to wonder or worry if at least for a second whether you are on the right place or not when that happens or if you got hijacked! Because many times, it would be a bogus search page with ads if you were hijacked too.But that problem as annoying as it is, is more of a symptom rather than a cause.Scot is in the very time consuming process of pouring over everything after the problems, and will let us know his findings as soon as he can.Thanks to all of you for your understanding.

[alphaomega]

<snip>The ads to me are the offensive part since you have to wonder or worry if at least for a second whether you are on the right place or not when that happens or if you got hijacked! Because many times, it would be a bogus search page with ads if you were hijacked too.<snip>

Exactly!Anyway, thanks for the explanation.Cheers

[Scot]

How's the site performing now? Are we still seeing emoticons that don't fill in and 503 errors? Those should be gone now.If not, I need to know about it!I didn't see the 503s myself, but I did see poor performance. I had turned on some code that would slow things down a bit, so I turned that off.-- Scot

[alphaomega]

How's the site performing now? Are we still seeing emoticons that don't fill in and 503 errors? Those should be gone now.If not, I need to know about it!I didn't see the 503s myself, but I did see poor performance. I had turned on some code that would slow things down a bit, so I turned that off.-- Scot

I have not noticed any blips so far today.